


Wholly Unbroken

by acollectionofdaydreams



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-It, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Quentin Coldwater Lives, Quentin Coldwater-centric, an exploration of breaking things, minor mendings, with just a touch of queliot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:54:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22502083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acollectionofdaydreams/pseuds/acollectionofdaydreams
Summary: In which Quentin Coldwater breaks things, but he fixes them too. An exploration of Quentin's discipline and who he was always meant to be with the kind of ending that actually acknowledges that character growth.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 3
Kudos: 104





	Wholly Unbroken

Quentin was tired. Honestly? He was just so _fucking_ tired. 

He was standing in his dead father’s house, packing up the things he’d once loved most, being watched and antagonized by a monster wearing the face of his best fucking friend, and his mother’s words were still ringing in the back of his mind.

_Don’t break anything._

That was really who he was to her, wasn’t it? Just the kid, who would always break things. He’d fought that identity for a long time growing up. He wasn’t just someone who broke things. He was someone who was good at school and loved his friends and obsessed over fantasy novels and always did the right thing no matter what the cost. Now though? He wasn’t so sure. Maybe she was onto something. There was plenty of evidence in her favor after all.

He’d broken Julia, when he let her think she wasn’t good enough and pushed her out into the cold. He’d broken Alice, when he told her she had to be the hero and she’d given everything to fill that role. Then again, when he’d brought her back kicking and screaming. He’d broken Eliot, when Eliot tried to recklessly save him in Castle Blackspire, and now he was this… thing. Lurking behind Quentin. Eliot might not even be in there at all anymore.

Hell, he'd broken all of magic.

And Quentin had no idea what to do with that. Any of it.

He startled when the monster threw one of the airplanes.

“Why did you do that?” Quentin asked, barely constraining his raised voice. The monster didn’t like yelling.

“Slightly more interesting,” he shrugged.

The monster didn’t get it. Of course he didn’t, and Quentin couldn’t believe he was having to explain it. It was like explaining to an alien why humans have to breathe.

“I don’t understand. Your father is dead, right? So these belong to you now,” the monster said.

“Yes,” Quentin agreed patiently. “They belong to me. What is your point?”

There are these human obligations that are just ingrained, and how could you explain that to someone so utterly inhuman? To someone who can’t understand why you would do something your mother asked you to do, when she was the only family you had left? Yeah, maybe she had left him here to deal with this on his own when alone was the last thing he needed to be. Maybe she wasn’t being who she should have been for him as a child grieving his father. Maybe she thought he broke things. Still, Quentin had this obligation to try to do the right thing. He’d never be who she wanted to him to be, but he still had to _try_.

He didn’t know how to explain that, so instead, he said, “Because once, when I was a kid, I broke an ashtray. And now she still fucking thinks that I break everything. Because… basically, your parents never change how they see you. No matter what.”

The monster looked contemplative as he took in Quentin’s words. Quentin wondered if maybe some part of him could understand that. He had to have parents, right? Someone whose expectations he could never live up to?

“So, if they can’t change how they see you, then why does it matter?” he asked.

In a small voice, Quentin admitted, “Because sometimes I think she’s right. Things break around me. Alice, my dad, all of goddamn magic.”

Then, as if it were the simplest thing in the entire world, the monster said, “Then break them on purpose. They’re your planes. You can do what you want with them. Maybe you’ll feel better.”

The monster almost sounded like he was trying to be comforting, and maybe that’s what pulled Quentin up short because he really started to think about it. Maybe his mother was right. Maybe he would always break things. Maybe he would never be able to live up to her fucking expectations, and maybe that meant he would never be who he was meant to be. The hero. The chosen one. The good, reliable one who always did the right thing. Maybe he’d never reach that pedestal, no matter how far he stretched. 

So, why _not_ break things on purpose?

He broke the wing off the plane in his hand and stared down at it. Then, before he could second guess himself, he turned and threw it against the wall. The plane shattered, and he let himself feel inexplicable relief in the way it felt to watch it fall apart. Maybe he should just break things. Who cares? The whole world was already broken, so why not add one more broken thing to it?

He threw another plane at the wall.

Or maybe, things were going to break anyways, and it just wasn’t his job to fix them.

*******

Repair of small objects.

Quentin had spent years feeling inadequate. Like there was a crucial part of his identity missing. Like something in him was _broken_ because everyone else knew who they were and he didn’t, and it had all led up to this. His discipline was repair of small objects.

It felt sort of like a cruel joke. His friends were phosphoromancers and telekinetics and psychics and goddesses, and he could do minor mending.

He guessed it made sense. He’d never been special. 

“I always thought it’d be something cooler,” he admitted to Alice.

She replied, “At least it’s real.”

He scoffed at her, but she carried on, “Now you don’t have to fantasize anymore about who you are and lie about who you wish you were. You just. You just know it now.”

She paused.

“And maybe you’ve always known it,” she finished.

It was a comforting thought, but she was wrong, wasn’t she? He hadn’t always known it. In fact, he’d known just the opposite for most of his life. He knew he broke things. He knew nothing he ever tried to fix stayed fixed, and it usually shattered in a million other unexpected ways simply because he’d touched it. 

If he was the person who fixed things, Eliot would fucking be here right now. His dad would still be alive. His mom would give him the time of day. Julia wouldn’t be powerless. Alice wouldn’t be giving him the saddest fucking eyes he’d ever seen when she realized it was him back from the past and not the naive boy she’d once loved. He wouldn’t be falling apart every single second that things got worse because if he fixed things, he could do something about it instead of just sinking further into despair.

What he knew was that his discipline was supposed to be the thing that changed all of that. He was supposed to finally make _sense_.

“Show me,” she told him.

He gave her a sidelong look. _What the hell_ , he thought. It’s just a minor mending.

So, he stooped to the floor and picked up the pieces of a shattered mug. He spread them out across the table and held his hands over them. Then, as he did the tuts to bring them back together again, it was like something in the air shifted.

It felt like they were calling to him. It was like they _wanted_ to be whole again, and they only needed him to remind them that it could happen. It almost didn’t feel like he was the one doing the mending at all. He’d just given them the nudge to mend themselves.

“How does it feel?” Alice asked.

He barely had to think about it before answering.

“Like I helped it wake up and remember what it was before.”

He looked at her, and he could see it in her eyes. He was never going to be the person that she wanted him to be. Or the person that his mom wanted him to be. Or the person _he’d_ wanted him to be. He was probably going to break a lot more things going forward.

But he could fix things too. 

In fact, some part of him was so intrinsically good at fixing things that it was his whole goddamn discipline. 

Maybe he was never going to be perfect, but maybe he was never meant to be. Maybe he was just supposed to be good. Maybe, just by virtue of existing and trying, something in him was reminding things that they wanted to be fixed.

And maybe, if he just held onto that feeling, he could remind himself that he wanted to be fixed too.

*******

Quentin practically collapsed under the feeling as the heavy cooperative spell ended and the monsters were sealed away in their bottles.

“We have to go now!” Penny told him. “We don’t know how long that’s going to hold.”

He looked down at Margo, with her tear-streaked cheeks, and then at Eliot, who was barely coherent as he struggled to sit up against his gaping wound.

“We have to take Eliot to Brakebills first,” he told Penny.

Penny started to say something, but he was silenced by Margo’s glare. Quentin was glad because he felt like he was barely hanging onto his last thread of sanity at the moment, and he wasn’t sure what he or Margo would have done if Penny hadn’t given in.

“Okay, hang on,” Penny told them. 

Quentin grabbed Penny, Margo grabbed Eliot, Penny grabbed Margo, and they traveled. As soon as they landed in a bloody, gasping heap outside the infirmary, they were surrounded by nurses.

“Someone help him!” Margo was screaming. “NOW!”

Professor Lipson skidded around the corner and stopped to look in horror at the scene in front of her.

“Get him in the OR,” she barked at a nurse next to her.

People began moving quickly then, and Eliot was loaded onto a gurney and rushed down the hall. Quentin was frozen in place as he watched Margo chase after them, screaming at Professor Lipson the whole way. 

He was supposed to go to the seam. That was the plan. They had to get rid of the monsters before the seal on the bottles could break or all of this would have been for nothing. It was the right thing to do. So why couldn’t he move?

Penny nudged him. He said, “Dude, Earth to Coldwater. We gotta go.”

Quentin stared down the now empty hallway and thought about right things and heroic acts and minor mendings. Things were always going to break, but maybe he didn’t have to keep breaking himself to fix them. Maybe he could just let them be fixed.

“Go,” he said to Penny. “Alice knows what to do, and she doesn’t need my help.”

It was a testament to how dire the situation was that Penny didn’t argue with him. He only nodded at Quentin, and then he was gone.

And Quentin felt… relieved. The world would be saved. His best friends would be okay. The only role he needed to fill now was to do what his heart had been screaming for him to do all along.

So, he ran down the hallway after Eliot.

*******

It took awhile. Due to all of the ambient magic being used to dispose of the monsters, Professor Lipson had to save Eliot’s life the old fashioned way. She’d insisted that she was more than capable, but that hadn’t stopped Margo from wearing a path in the carpet of the waiting room they’d been ushered off to. Quentin could only alternate between watching her and placing his head in his hands as they waited. He wanted to believe that Eliot would be just fine. Compared to everything else the monster had put his body through, what was one axe wound to the gut? But he’d seen the wound. It was deep. It looked really bad. Margo’s panic wasn’t helping.

Then, finally, Professor Lipson returned. She was covered in blood, which made Quentin’s stomach turn because that was _Eliot’s_ blood. She had a relieved look on her face though.

“Eliot is going to be fine,” she told them, and both he and Margo let out a joint sigh of relief.

Only then did Margo sink down into the chair next to him.

“When can we see him?” she asked.

Quentin felt her hand wrap around his, and he squeezed hers back just as tightly. 

“He should wake up in a few hours after the anesthesia wears off,” she told them. She gave them a once over and wrinkled her nose. “In the meantime, you two should eat something and maybe change your clothes.”

Quentin looked over at Margo and noted that she was also covered in Eliot’s blood. He hadn’t noticed before.

Obviously Margo didn’t want to leave, but some part of Quentin had perked up enough at the suggestion of food that he realized he hadn’t eaten anything in… maybe days.

So, they went back to the penthouse and they changed clothes and they ate a sandwich each. When they returned to the hospital, Eliot was still resting peacefully. They each took a seat by his bed though and they waited.

About an hour later, his eyes opened.

“Hi, Bambi,” he croaked, his voice sounding like he’d swallowed a knife. Then he coughed.

Margo immediately reached for his hand, and Quentin turned around to fill up a glass of water. At the sound of the sink running, Eliot turned his head. Quentin met his eyes, and he almost dropped the glass at the realization that they were Eliot’s eyes, not the monster’s. Then a careful little smile turned up the corners of his mouth, and Eliot smiled back. It was maybe the best thing Quentin had seen in months.

“Q,” he breathed.

Quentin sat back down slowly and handed him the water, and Eliot took a sip before setting it aside. There were so many words to say and also no words at all, so Quentin just did was his heart was telling him to do. He reached for Eliot’s hand and grinned when Eliot met him halfway.

As their fingers laced together and came to rest on Eliot’s bedside, it felt like something in him had woken up and remembered who he was before. Like, in that moment, he was _exactly_ who he was meant to be.

Let the world break around him. It wasn’t his to fix. 

But he could fix this.

**Author's Note:**

> I got real fired up about this and wrote it in a manic flurry of keyboard smashing. I would love to hear what you think!


End file.
